Lofi Oddity is a beautiful free “degradation toy box” plug-in

Lofi Oddity for macOS and Windows features a unique set of sonic degradation filters – and makes an excellent tour of the work plugin maker aberrant dsp is doing on modeling nonlinearities and destruction.

C4NDY KeyVLM, a USB keyboard that connects to a vinyl turntable for mixing

Make your transition into this: it’s the intersection of a love of custom DIY USB keyboards, computers and mobile devices, turntables, and vinyl mixing. Yamamoto Shunichi shares their creation, C4NDY KeyVLM, an ortholinear-layout keyboard for combining mobile digital and vinyl sets.

LANDR, AI-powered mastering, all grown-up: plug-in test

LANDR’s machine learning-powered mastering service is now more than a simple web tool. The quality of the results has matured over years of development, and you can opt for a plug-in version with a complete set of tweakable controls. So, is the current offering worth considering, even if you know what you’re doing with mastering tools?

A year in music: don’t-miss releases, unsung gems, unhyped breakthroughs

In difficult times, paying attention to music can be an act of humanity. We turn to music not because it attracts attention, but because we want to fill our ears and souls. From Indonesia-to-Mexico collaborations to resurfacing legends, Mongolian hip hop to rethought AI, David Abravanel is back with a personal set of selections to round out the year.

Chill out to some granular goodness in Modular Play on Playdate portable

Creator Orllewin didn’t just produce a magical minimalistic modular in glorious black and white on Panic’s Playdate mobile system. There is beautiful music to go along with it – and an upcoming free port to Lua (meaning support for other platforms).

Suzanne Ciani’s YouTube is a treasure trove, and she’s uploading more now

Want to fill your YouTube feed with basically all synthesizer legend Suzanne Ciani, all the time? Now’s a great time to click subscribe, as she’s uploading an incredible amount of music. (Eat your heart out, Aphex Twin.) Also, can we pause and just consider that she wrote an incredible composition for a beeping GE dishwasher?

This free Reaktor granular instrument was born in a vintage synth studio

System Flow for Reaktor 6 features a 32-grain, two-sample-slot granular engine for producing drones and textures – and it’s completely free. It was all born at Synthesizer Studio Berlin, a rentable studio full of classic vintage analog and early digital synths.

Field system, completed: Teenage Engineering TP-7 recorder test

Teenage Engineering’s fecund design imagination has yielded inventions wonderful, ambitious, sometimes prohibitively expensive, odd… but can the company reinvent the lowly field recorder? And was the “field system” just marketing vision or pipe dream – or does it bring those pieces together for something genuinely musical and productive? We turn again to CDM’s at-large Swedish gear tester (and tester of Swedish gear) Andreas Roman for a proper review. -Ed.

Rhodes V-Pan, free through January, offers versatile, musical panning

Rhodes – yeah, that Rhodes – is giving away the V-Pan panning plug-in they’ve just introduced. The hardware-style panning borrowed from Rhodes’ Vari-Pan circuitry is worth adding to your arsenal as a versatile auto-panner. Week of Free continues…

That time Kraftwerk invented electronic drum pads and made ethereal sounds

Wolfgang Flür left a string of technological innovations, but if you need a moment of sublime chill in a chaotic world, look no further to the pastoral sounds that accompanied what was arguably the first electronic drum kit.